


Leave Her, Jonny

by RingingSilence



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Angst, Jon & Tim-centric, Roughly follows them from their Research days through 160, Season 1-4, Shanties, Temporary Amnesia, can be read as JonTim, technically a fix-it? Maybe?, technically a songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29366304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RingingSilence/pseuds/RingingSilence
Summary: “Just a few more notes.”Tim sighed. Instead of leaving though, his arm went over Jon’s other shoulder and Jon felt him smile. “I thought I heard the Old Man say…”“Tim,” Jon growled.
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker
Comments: 10
Kudos: 64





	Leave Her, Jonny

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is dedicated to Peter Lukas. Rest in pieces, you garbage sailor.

It started during their Research days. 

For some reason or other, shanties had come up. Tim had wondered aloud about them and Jon had made the mistake of starting in on the importance of shanties to bind a crew together. He hadn’t realized until it was too late that Tim had gotten that gleam in his eye, the one that meant Jon had revealed some weakness Tim was going to gleefully exploit. It hadn’t even been a day before Tim had started singing to him. Not loudly: it was always just a few words as he passed behind Jon in the hall or a verse or two when they were alone in the elevator, maybe a line when Jon was trying to copy something down so Jon would accidentally write the lyrics instead. The first time Jon crumpled up a ruined report and hurled it at him Tim had laughed. 

It became a game then. Tim would slip fragments of shanties to him like rumors and Jon would do his utmost to pretend that he was annoyed by the attention. In his quest to get Jon to crack, Tim began adding touches to the singing: a prod to Jon’s back, an arm slung over his shoulders, maybe a hair-ruffle if he was feeling bold. Every time, Jon played his part by griping and grumbling even as he tentatively, then gradually more comfortably, leaned into the contact. Tim slowly opened up, smiled more, sang a little louder and laughed a little more freely. Jon could scowl all he wanted but there was no denying the way he leaned his head against Tim’s when he leaned over Jon’s shoulder to make fun of whatever he was working on.

One evening, Jon stayed late to finish a report. Tim normally left when the rest of the department did but that night Jon was forced to listen to the squeak of his chair rolling long after the rest of the Institute fell silent. It was no surprise when the wheels rolled over carpet and Tim’s chin dug into his shoulder. 

“Jon.”

“I’m finishing up a few things. You should go home.”

“Not before you do. You’ll be here all night otherwise.”

“Just a few more notes.”

Tim sighed. Instead of leaving though, his arm went over Jon’s other shoulder and Jon felt him smile. “ _I thought I heard the Old Man say…_ ”

“Tim,” Jon growled.

Tim laughed. “ _Leave her Jonny, leave her. For tomorrow you will get your pay…_ ”

“I get the point.”

“ _And it’s time for us to leave her._ ”

With an exaggerated groan, Jon pushed back from his desk to glare at Tim. “Fine, look, I’m leaving.”

Tim hummed the entire way out the door.

The problem with Tim was once he started to thaw he was an easy man to like. While that in itself wasn’t a problem it did mean Tim got on with their coworkers, which meant he was invited out for drinks frequently, which meant Jon was dragged along whenever he couldn’t come up with a good excuse not to.

Which is how he ended up staggering out of a bar with Tim hanging off of him long after the last train had left the station. He was giddy with alcohol but not so tipsy that he didn’t remember the rules of their game. 

“This is why I should know better than to let you drag me along on these excursions,” he grumbled. “Now I’ll have to sleep in the break room and deal with the sore back all day tomorrow.”

Tim grinned and jostled him. “Just come back to my place. I’ve got room.”

“You’re unbearable sober after a cup of coffee. Why would I subject myself to you with a hangover?”

“Jon!” Tim slung himself a little more over Jon’s shoulders and pressed his cold nose against Jon’s ear. He laughed when Jon yelped. “ _Oh, the grub was bad an' the wages low…_ ”

“Tim.”

“ _But now once more ashore we'll go…_ ”

Jon tried to duck out from under Tim’s arm but Tim just held on tighter and raised his voice.

“ _Leave her Jonny, leave her. Oh leaver her Jonny, leave her!_ ” 

People on the street around them began to stare. 

“Fine, fine. Just quiet down!”

Tim cackled and squeezed him. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Jon still woke up with an aching back and a pounding head, but Tim’s couch was more comfortable than the one in the breakroom and it was nice to wake up to a hot cup of coffee.

Tim transformed over the months in Research, but it just made it more obvious when he occasionally regressed to the distant, dull-eyed ghost Jon had first met. When a day passed without his usual gentle bullying Jon found himself shooting glances at his fellow researcher. Tim sat hunched over his work, shoulders nearly up to his ears and barely moving except to turn pages or scrawl out a listless note. When he ignored an invite from their coworkers to take part in a lunchtime Tesco run, Jon waited until they had left and approached his desk. “Tim?”

Tim may as well have been carved from stone for how much he reacted.

Jon hesitated before putting a hand on his shoulder and his sandwich in front of him. “If there’s anything I can do…”

Tim still didn’t respond so Jon patted his shoulder awkwardly and slunk back to his own desk. He glanced back a few minutes later and was relieved to see Tim picking at the offering, probably still eating more of it than Jon would have. He didn’t perk up exactly but some of the tension seeped out of him over the course of the afternoon. It was still a surprise when he lingered until the others had left at the end of the day, even moreso when he shuffled over to lean over Jon’s shoulder. 

“ _…We was made to pump all night an’ day. Leave her Jonny, leave her. An we half-dead had beggar-all to say and it’s time for us to leave her._ ”

Jon didn’t grumble, just quietly said: “you can’t be feeling too poorly if you still have the energy to harass me.”

He didn’t laugh at that, exactly, but the breath that gusted out of him almost resembled one. “Sure.”

There was something familiar there in the exhaustion, the emptiness. By the end, Georgie had been close to normal but enough of their relationship was spent trying to bring her back that Jon barely had to think about it before he was carefully pushing his chair back. “Come on.”

Tim didn’t ask what they were doing, even when they crept into the dark and empty breakroom. Even when Jon pulled him down onto the tiny threadbare couch, his only response was to sigh and hum a few more notes from the shanty. He wasn’t quite as small as Georgie, but Jon didn’t complain. In the morning his back would ache again and Tim would make veiled jokes about him being an old man for most of the day, but for the moment Jon just held his friend and stared up at the dark ceiling. 

He hadn’t meant to start a routine, but the same thing happened the next time Tim was out of sorts, and the next. After a while all Tim had to do was drape himself over Jon and start humming _Leave her Johnny_ and they would end up cuddled up somewhere. Even when it wasn’t a request, Tim sang shanties around Jon often enough that if he was distracted Jon would start humming along, much to his own embarrassment and Tim’s wicked delight.

Then, they met Sasha.

It’s not that they’d never crossed paths before: she was a research assistant like them. She had however been with the Institute longer than either of them and there was rarely call for a senior researcher to spend time around the newcomers. She just happened to pass them one day just after Tim had tricked Jon into humming along to _The Wellerman_.

“Did he get his hands on that Leitner? I hear Sophie’s been stuck singing Fair Spanish Ladies all morning.”

“No, Tim is just being his usual disruptive self,” Jon grumbled.

“You wound me!”

And that had been that. Sasha began coming around more, Tim and Jon started getting her input on assignment and the three of them got on like a house on fire. Jon almost didn’t notice how Tim gradually stopped coming to him on his off days. It was fine. The three of them got on and it wasn’t like Tim didn’t still take every excuse he could find to pester Jon. Getting caught tricking Jon into humming _Randy Dandy-O_ even launched Sasha and Jon into a half-hour argument about the differences between a shanty and a sea song to which Tim listened with an exasperated smile and a dramatic declaration of his regrets in ever letting them cross paths. It didn’t matter that contact reduced to just normal Tim levels of office familiarity. Who cared that Tim rarely waited up for Jon anymore, leaving Jon to an empty office until he literally had to run to catch the tube home? Tim seemed happy. They were still friends. In fact, Jon had more common ground with Sasha: more academic training, more knowledge on the supernatural (except for Smirke: Tim had absolute dominion over that area). So, it was fine. They were fine.

Then, Jon was offered the promotion. It was an opportunity he couldn’t afford to say ‘no’ to, had nothing to lose and everything to gain by accepting. So, he took it. Sasha and Tim even let him drag them along as assistants. Things became a little more distant after, but that was only to be expected. Jon was the boss. He couldn’t afford to waste time joking around anymore. They all still went out together sometimes and Tim would whistle shanties when Jon was less tense and Jon still got into intellectual debates with Sasha and…it was fine. It was fine.

Then, the Prentiss attack happened and everything was not fine, not at all. Someone had murdered Gertrude, someone close, and the only one who seemed normal was Sasha except no, she didn’t draw Jon in with her easy charm anymore. He tried to be fair, but everyone was a suspect and with the lack of evidence from security and the police he had to look for it himself. He should have been more careful.

“You were watching my house.” Tim was furious, shaking with rage and beneath the defiant, fearful parts of himself, Jon knew he had every right to be.

Martin tried, he really did, but it was clear even to Jon that Tim had been pushed past his patience’s limits. He shoved himself up from his chair, looked Jon straight in the eye, and hummed. “ _Oh the skipper was bad but the mate was worse…_ ”

That silenced Jon more completely than anything he could have said. Tim stormed out with Martin close behind, but Jon sat frozen in his chair long after and savored the feeling of his heart bricking itself away. Some part of him hoped that it was a one-off, that Tim just had to get the jab off of his chest and then they could move on, but if anything he jumped on the revealed weakness. All it took was a few notes of the shanty and Jon would leave the room. Jon started avoiding the assistants’ office if he could and Tim stayed far away from his. It was only when Jon finally solved the mystery of Sasha, or rather Not-Sasha, that he breached the unspoken ceasefire. 

“Go home, Tim.”

Tim glowered at him, his eyes narrowed in suspicion, but didn’t move from his chair. 

So, Jon did the first thing that came to mind. He didn’t sing, he didn’t have the voice for it, but he did roughly follow the cadence: “ _oh leave her, Johnny, and we’ll work no more—_ “

Tim’s chair screeched with the force he used to shove it back from his desk. He stared up at Jon and Jon stared unsteadily back, clinging onto the doorframe to hide the way his hands shook. After an eternity and no time at all, Tim broke the contest to snatch up his coat. “We’re leaving, Martin.”

Martin jumped. “What?”

“I said _we’re leaving_ ,” Tim snapped. He kicked his chair back behind his desk and Jon shrank a little into the doorframe when Tim stopped to loom over him. Despite his fear he didn’t let himself look away and Tim’s mouth curled into a grimace. “Whatever you’re up to had better be worth it.” With that he shoved past Jon and stormed towards the stairs. “See you Monday, boss.”

“Wait, Tim! We should probably—“

The stairwell door clanged shut behind them and Jon waited for their muffled echoes to fade before daring to breathe. His heart was a leaden weight as he set about his preparations.

The next time they got a moment alone together was so much later; after blood and murder and kidnapping and the horrible truth of their predicament was brought to light. Guilt or fear or some combination urged Jon to avoid contact with his remaining assistants as much as possible but he couldn’t do all of his research from Georgie’s flat. He tried to sneak through unnoticed, but he nearly walked right into Tim as he ducked into document storage.

“Finally decided to make an appearance, boss?”

Jon didn’t have a good reply for that so he tried to edge past Tim. “Excuse me.”

Tim stepped into his path. “Not even a hello?”

“I didn’t think you would want to speak to me, to be honest.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to be here either. Doesn’t mean we get what we want.”

“Tim—“

“Where have you been, boss?”

He considered just turning around and trying again later, but got the feeling it wasn’t a conversation he could avoid indefinitely. “…Staying with a friend.”

Tim snorted.

“What?”

“Sorry, just hard to imagine you with friends. All those late nights in research…”

“Yes, well…” 

“What’s their name?”

“…Georgie.”

Tim smirked. “ _Georgie_ , huh?”

For one fleeting moment he felt like they were back in their research days, Tim teasing him mercilessly over something private and inconsequential and it was oh so easy to slip into his part. “Yes, Georgie. My friend. Now, if you’ll excuse me I have work to do.” He sidled past Tim and tried to ignore the feeling of his eyes burning into the back of his head. He was not very successful, his own eyes slipping over the statement labels without reading them. 

“So that’s it? You’re just going to act like nothing happened?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why follow the status quo? Why go back to these bloody statements like nothing’s changed?”

“Because I want answers, Tim, and so far with Elias unwilling to share what he knows—“

“You’re going along with whatever he has planned?”

Jon gave up on trying to work and turned back to him. “What else am I supposed to do?”

Tim slouched over to him, his posture relaxed but his eyes hard in a way Jon hadn’t seen since their early days in Research. “Honestly, I’m more than a little tempted to just burn this place to the ground.”

“We still haven’t gotten all of the answers, and you heard Elias: if he dies there is no telling what my happen to the rest of the Institute.”

“Better dead than helping this evil place.”

“Elias is trying to save the world—“

“Come on, you have to be able to see it. To _feel_ it.”

“Feel what?”

“Whatever Elias says he’s doing he’s up to something, something bad, and I’m not interested in helping him.”

Instinctively, Jon reached for a tape recorder he hadn’t even realized was in his pocket. “Maybe we should—“

The reaction when Tim noticed what he had was immediate. His lip curled in disgust and he jerked back. “No.”

“Tim.”

“I’m not one of those freaks who give you statements!”

The conversation had quickly fallen into a shouting match that left Jon feeling more alone than ever. Not long after that, Nikola kidnapped him. He was more surprised that Michael came to find him than that no one else did.

After that he and Tim stayed as far away from each other as they could. Even planning for the Unknowing, they sat as far away from each other as they could and the night before the event itself Tim claimed the hotel room while Jon went down to the lobby and listened to Gertrude’s tapes. 

Everything went right. Then, everything went wrong. It was all a mishmash of confusion and chaos and Jon lost what they were supposed to be doing until, beneath the carnival music and screaming, he heard someone singing:

“ _The ship won’t steer, nor stay, nor wear…_ ”

All of Jon’s attention was absorbed by the song, pulled right out of the disorder and back to the present. It took quite a bit of elbowing and he flinched at every touch from the dancers but none of it, not even Jurgen and Gertrude’s disapproving voices, could sway him from the siren’s song. Even when Tim stopped singing to wrestle him to the ground, the shanty continued to hum in his bones.

“Tim, what do you see?”

The slow peel of Tim’s rage into a vicious smile set Jon’s heart racing. “…So, the skipper was bad after all. Does that make me or Martin the mate, I wonder?”

Nikola was powerless to blind him, and even through her screaming the last thing Jon heard was Tim humming the rest of the song and then, just before he hit the detonator: “thank you.”

Jon was dead, but he wasn’t. He revisited statements in dreams and listened to Martin drifting further and further away when he wasn’t. He was awake but asleep, trapped aware and sunken in darkness. For a while though, every now and then, he thought he heard someone humming a song that tugged at his heart and soul until he wanted to scream through the cold and distance. 

And then it was gone.

And then, he woke up.

Martin was gone. 

Well, not ‘gone’ but he may as well have been for the distance that separated them metaphorically if not physically. From where Jon stood in the silence of the archives, Elias’ office felt so very far away. He wandered from desk to desk in the assistant’s bullpen, running his fingers through the dust on Martin’s and tracing the edge of a framed photo lying face-down on its surface. He carefully lifted it back up and his heart lurched. 

Had that birthday party only been three years before? They all looked so young, so unaware of the terror and tragedy that would soon consume them. Jon, Martin, Sasha, and…

…and…

A fragment of a song brought the name back. “…Tim…”

Basira glanced up from the book she was reading. “Something wrong?”

“No, no, not exactly. I just…” He nearly set the picture back down but his fingers refused to loosen from the frame. “Did he…Tim…”

She frowned. “Who?”

“Tim, the uh…” He waved at her desk. “The…the other assistant. He was there, at the Unknowing, with me and…and Daisy.”

“…Oh…Oh, yeah, Tim.” She set her book down and massaged her temples. “Sorry, must have forgot…”

“Did he die?”

She shook her head. “No, he wasn’t in great shape but he made it. Woke up about a week after everything.”

“Oh.” Jon glanced around the empty office. “Then…where…?”

“Dunno. He kind of…kept to himself after he got back. Always down in the tunnels, or trying to talk to Martin. I don’t think I’ve seen him since…since the Flesh attack, I guess. Said something about Lukas. So many people just disappeared, killed or consumed by those things…” She shook her head. “Sorry, what was your question?”

Feeling foolish for pawing through Martin’s things, Jon put the frame back down. “Um…something about the Unknowing, I think? Something about…Oh, have you heard from Martin at all, lately?”

Weeks later, he and Daisy were sitting together on the floor of his office. She’d pulled up The Archers on her phone and they sat shoulder to shoulder, each with a single earbud to listen. Normally, physical contact reminded him too much of his experience with Nikola but in the solitude of his office, warm and safe…

A snatch of music, barely more than a few notes, flitted through his mind. “… _Oh the wind won’t blow_ …”

“What was that?”

Just as quickly as it had arrived, it drifted off. Jon shrugged and resettled. “Nothing, just something I must have heard, once.”

The fog pressed in on them, thick and heavy, and the cold stubbornly clung to Martin’s clothes but he was there. Finally, finally, he was there.

“How will we get home,” Martin murmured into his shoulder.

Jon gave him one more squeeze before letting go. He took Martin by the hand instead, delighted and relieved and so very tired when Martin automatically wove their fingers together. “Don’t worry, I know the way. Come on.”

They made it about five steps before Martin pulled him to a stop. “Wait.”

“What’s wrong?” Jon watched, increasingly concerned, as Martin frowned and shook his head and squinted into the fog. “Lukas his gone, he won’t be back.”

“No, no, not him.” Martin shook his head again, eyes screwed tightly shut. “No, I saw someone else, in the fog. I know I know him, but…God, what was his name?”

“I’m sure there are many people trapped here.”

“I knew him, Jon! He was just…just curled up on the ground. I only noticed he was there because he was humming to himself. He was so quiet, but I recognized it because it was one of those awful songs he used to sing to tease you.”

“To tease…,” Jon started to say. Maybe the Eye was eager for the fear remembering would bring, maybe he was still charged from Lukas’ statement. It didn’t matter why: the memories slammed back into him and he actually staggered. “Tim.”

“Y-yes, yes, Tim! Peter must have taken him and, Jon, he’s been here for so long. We can’t…we can’t leave him here!”

Rather than answer, Jon squeezed Martin’s hand and cupped his free one around his mouth to shout into the Lonely: “Tim!”

His voice was muffled and faint against the misty air. He tried again anyway, and Martin did too but his throat caught on the sudden sound and he fell into a coughing fit. There was no reply and Jon couldn’t see him. 

“I’m sorry,” Martin rasped miserably. “It was so long ago, and I was already so tired I don’t know which way…What about you?”

“No…the Eye can’t See him through the fog…” He tried anyway, letting the buzz of static fill his head and strained to see anything besides formless gray. After almost a full minute his balance wavered and Martin caught him.

“Jon…”

The Eye, ever unhelpful, reaffirmed his knowledge that try as he might he would never find Tim. He could try wandering in the gloom but without any idea of where to look there were low odds for success. Besides, he’d just managed to find Martin who was still shivering at his side. He had no way of knowing how much longer he could withstand the Lonely, or how long the path out might remain open for. There simply wasn’t time.

As the fog curled longingly around them, one last idea came to him. Jon held tightly onto Martin’s hand and filled his lungs with the damp air. 

_“I thought I heard the Old Man say: Leave her, Johnny, leave her!”_

The words sounded so weak and frail, his own nerves sending the notes quavering into the void. He faltered and Martin squeezed his hand. “Jon?”

“H-he needs an anchor. It’s not much, but…” He swallowed his fears and continued out through the chorus. This time, he waited to see if there was a reply. Nothing.

_“…Oh, the skipper was bad, but the mate was worse—“_

A new voice, hoarse and unfamiliar, murmured out to them. “Leave her, Johnny, Leave her.”

Jon startled so badly he nearly crashed into Martin and fell silent. The new voice didn’t return so he tentatively called out: _“He’d blow you down with a spite and a curse,”_

 _“And it’s time for us to leave her,”_ the voice replied. It joined him through to the end of the chorus. 

_“Oh pull you lubbers or you’ll get no pay!”_

_“Leave her, Jonny, leave her,”_ a few new voices chimed in, faint and rusty at first, then growing. 

_“Oh pull you lubbers and then belay,”_

_“And it’s time for us to leave her.”_ Shapes started moving in the haze. As the song continued, dull-eyed people emerged and congregated around Jon and Martin with strengthening voices. They always paused for Jon to call out the lead parts, but when they responded it was in a bassy chorus that shook the very air around them. Even Martin joined in and at the end of another chorus the words echoed in that place where before the mist had swallowed them. Still, Jon couldn’t see or hear Tim so he sang on.

_“The work was hard and the voyage was long,”_

Towards the back of the crowd, there finally came movement that felt different. Martin’s fingers clung to his so hard it ached but Jon just held on tighter and began tugging him through the gathering towards it.

_“The sea was high an’ the gales was strong,”_

Breathlessly, he let the group take up the song so he and Martin could keep fighting forward. There weren’t more than a dozen or so people but they bunched close together and Jon was so tired, the air rasped out of his song-hoarse lungs.  
And then the crowd parted.

He did not sing, did not smile, did not do more than shamble forward with a dead-eyed stare, but still Tim Stoker came and as soon as he was close enough Jon caught him by the hand. All around them, the other found souls carried on singing without them. Jon gently tugged on Tim’s hand and squeezed Martin’s. “Let’s go home.”

Daisy’s safehouse was small, even for one person. For three it was claustrophobic. Basira had offered to put Tim up but Tim had just looked at her blankly and when Jon and Martin had hurried off to the train station he had trailed along behind them. There was only one bed, Daisy hadn’t needed more, so Martin and Jon shared it while Tim took the threadbare loveseat. The two rooms were separated by a partial wall rather than a door but they made do. During the day they would swap: Tim would watch them silently from the edge of the bedroom while they went about their day. He never spoke or approached them, just watching with gradually sharper eyes and lingering nearby like a stray cat.

When the statements from Basira finally arrived and Martin left to give him privacy, Jon expected Tim to tag along with him. Instead he ducked back into the bedroom. Jon didn’t step around the partition, just knocked from just around the corner. “I…I’m going to record a statement, if you didn’t hear. If you don’t want to listen you could join Martin or wander on your own for a bit.”

Silence.

“Right…right…” Jon turned to leave but something made him hesitate. When the words finally shaped themselves they surprised even him. “I, um…I’m sorry, Tim. I was…paranoid, and blind, and I should have stopped to see who was getting hurt by it sooner. I never apologized for the…the stalking, or the lack of sympathy. You deserved someone to talk to and I was too caught up in everything to be that, but…” He hesitated. “…You were suffering, too. I’m sorry.”

As always, Tim didn’t answer.

Jon waited until the pause felt too awkward. “Right…well, I….I’ll be recording, then.”

He’d been looking forward to the relief of a fresh statement but when he returned to the loveseat he found himself puttering anxiously: shifting around the tape recorder, shuffling pages, trying and failing to get comfortable on the hard cushions. He’d just resigned himself to discomfort and pressed the record button on the tape when a low hum reached his ear. 

_“…Now I thought I heard the Old Man say: Leave her, Jonny, Leave her. One more good heave an’ then belay…”_

Jon froze, holding his breath. The creaking song, barely above a murmur, wound closer and closer until there was a chin resting on one shoulder and an arm slung over the other. 

_“Leave her Jonny, Leave her. Oh leave her, Jonny, leave her…”_

Tim leaned into him until Jon was forced down onto the loveseat with Tim sprawled half on top of him. The statement fluttered to the floor and the tape recorder followed it with a pathetic _thump_. 

_“For the voyage is long and the wind don’t blow, and it’s time for us to leave her,”_ Tim finished the verse and fell silent. The pause that followed felt tense, expectant.

“…I don’t forgive you.”

Jon swallowed. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“I don’t know if I ever will.”

“I wouldn’t either, in your place.”

Tim scoffed into the curve of Jon’s neck. “You bastard. It’s just like you not to fight back. You could at least pretend to have a little pride.”

“Sorry, I think I lost any I had left after I became dependent on recording strangers’ trauma to survive.”

Tim punched him in the shoulder. “’Shouldn’t’ve died for…how long were you dead for?”

Hours later, after filling Tim in on what had happened since he’d been dumped in the Lonely, Jon was woken up by Martin’s muffled squeal of delight and his back aching from the angle Tim had squashed him into the cushions.

Later, he sat on the couch and watched while Martin and Tim rinsed the ashes of the statement down the sink. He swallowed his curiosity about what it had contained.

Tim and Martin took to vetting statements while Jon cleaned the tiny safehouse. While they bickered over something on the couch he hunched over the sink and scrubbed the burned remains of a casserole out of the single glass pan they’d found and tried to tune them out. It was enough of a distraction that he didn’t notice when they fell suspiciously silent, or Tim as he crept up behind him.

_“Farewell and adieu to ye fair Spanish ladies, farewell and adieu to ye ladies of Spain, for we’ve received order to sail for Old England…”_

Jon didn’t think, didn’t hesitate, until he was already singing: " _…and hope very shortly to see you ag—_ Tim!”

Martin laughed, and Tim? Tim threw his head back and cackled.


End file.
